Scholarly Research Journal for Humanity Science & English Language,

Online ISSN 2348-3083, SJIF 2016 = 4.44, www.srjis.com

UGC Approved Sr. No.48612, AUG-SEPT 2017, VOL- 4/23
https://doi.org/10.21922/srjhsel.v4i23.9630

THE PRESENTATION OF WEARINESS IN THE SELECT POEMS OF

JAYANTA MAHAPATRA
Vijay D. Mangukiya, Ph. D.
Assistant Professor, Shree J.D.Gabani Com. Coll. and Shree S.A.S. Coll. of Mgt., Surat

Abstract

The poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra is an expression of certain kinds of crises that have been witnessed
by their generations. He is profoundly and explicitly preoccupied by the predicament of his
generation, and his poems have become objects of the expression of that predicament and weariness.
His poems are profoundly marked by contemporary crises and disillusionment, which are prevailed in
his respective social panorama. His poems are the dark glasses through which life is seen with
strange clarity. Life seen through those dark glasses is grey, monotonous, desolate, empty, grotesque,
paralyzed and hopeless with full of weariness and fatigue. Mahapatra is deeply and philosophy
concerned with the predicament of his generations, which have been, the victims of squalor,
decadence, malaise, morbidity, profligacy, dissipation, depravity and agony of spiritual lapse due to
the disillusionment prevailed in his age. The poems are the expression of a devastating analysis of the
society of his time which suffers from the psychic blow. The researcher has tried to discuss some of
his poems which reveal such images.
Keywords: decadence, disillusionment, sexual perversion, sado-masochism, hysteria

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The history is a record of many crises in the human relation to ultimate reality. The zeitgeist
is captured in the works of art. Usually these crises shape the art and literature of an age and,
in turn, literature becomes an expression of the time spirit of that age. The poetry of Jayanta
Mahapatra is an expression of certain kinds of crises that have been witnessed by their
generations. He is profoundly and explicitly preoccupied by the predicament of his
generation, and his poems have become objects of the expression of that predicament. His
poems are profoundly marked by contemporary crises and weariness, which are prevailed in
his respective social panorama. Life seen through those dark glasses is grey, monotonous,
desolate, empty, grotesque, paralyzed and hopeless.
Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of remarkable power and vision. He has made his mark on the
scene of Indian English poetry during 1970s and 80s decades. During this time, Indian
society was enveloped by unsolved anxiety, horror and uncertainties and his poetry is
inevitably influenced and conditioned by this traumatic situations. Mahaptra is intensely
aware of the alienation and isolation. He is conscious of the searing pain, gloom and the
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consequent existential anguish. He is not the poets like Naidu, Tagore, Derozio who will sing
the sing of Nature and find peace in it. But being a modern poet, he gets caught in the
currents of time and the main current manifestation was: disillusionment, agony, squalor,
mental dirt and anxiety.
Mahapatras poems are inevitably influenced and conditioned by the mental and moral state
of disillusioned and hollow social panorama in which he is entangled. Mahapatra shows a
thoughtful perception of the sordidness and malaise of his social world in his poems. His
poems are filled with the gloom, horror and trauma that he has witnessed in the realm of his
country. He is preoccupied by the sense of weariness and decadence.
His poetry is about a relationship of man to his self i.e. soul, man to man, man to time, and
man to land. In his poems, one finds the quest of identity. The protagonist or the mask
persona of the poem seems to be doubtful to his or her own identity. He or she is in a search
of the self, but he or she is sceptic and decadent. In fact, the decadence, an outcome of
disillusionment an anxiety has caused various types of mental diseases which make him or
her totally lost. The image of being lost is quite clear in the poem entitled A Missing
Person where the mask personas inner self is lost. It means to say that she is unable to find
her image in the mirror even though she holds an oil lamp. Here, Mahapatra conveys the
meaning that ultra - modern and mechanic generation has lost its identity. The lady in this
poem is the mouthpiece of modern youth who is disillusioned in such a way that she is unable
to hear the voice of her conscience. Her visibility has become problematic. So one may
assume that the lady in the poem has become the victim of psychological disease namely
Bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is such a depressed phase in which a person tends to appear
lethargic and withdrawn, and also expresses feeling of worthlessness, guilt, intense feeling of
loss, sadness hopelessness, failure and rejection. The lady in the poem is such lethargic and
depressed that she finds herself lost and withdrawn. That is why, she lacks visibility and
concentration to perceive the outer world. For this reason, she is totally unable to find her
own self in the mirror. The following lines of this poem show the invisibility and lack of
clarity with which modern disillusioned youth is living,
In the darkened room a woman
cannot find her reflection in the mirror
waiting as usual at the edge of sleep.
In her hands she holds the oil lamp
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whose drunken yellow flames

know where her lonely body hides. (Mahapatra, 89)
Here, the phrase the darkened room signifies the gloom that has enveloped the visibility of
that mask persona. There is not the darkness in the outer world, but the main problem lies in
the psyche of that lady. There is a schism between the inner and outer selves which doesnt
allow her to see the image in the. To quote the words of one researcher in this respect,
She is tired and bored-waiting as usual at the edge of sleep-and
contemplating her figure in the mirror. She holds in her hands an oil lamp shedding
a dim yellow light which enables her to see her body reflected in the mirror, but no
light is shed on her inner self, her lonely psyche or soul. Her inner sufferings and
frustrations are never externalized and never understood. The woman does not
speak, but her inner self has been dramatically presented through a few deft
touches. (Nayak, 15)
This means to say that there a light, but that light does not shed on her inner self. She seems
afraid, timid and skeptical in her self-interpretation as there is a gap between her actual self
i.e. the external agency and her inner self. Her inner self is fragmented as she is unsure of his
selfhood. She is unable to perceive the reality as she feels tormented. The lady in the poem is
neurotic who is suffering from the psychic conflicts. Hers is the buried self which is
paralyzed with the social self. Hers is the split personality as there is a gap between the actual
self i.e. reality and buried self. Her illusion of seeing her image in the mirror is shattered by
her own invisibility. She is physically present into the external arena, but absent within. The
grief of the poem is seen when she is not able to come out from within to without as she is
disillusioned. She cant journey from inner to outer, from within to without and from mind to
material. And for that reason there is an utter silence in the poem, as one cant find the
movement in the whole poem. She feels sad as she is isolated and lonely and this is one of the
chief traits of Mahapatra to portray the hollowness and the psychic trauma of the female
characters in his poetry.
In his poetry, Mahapatra explicitly deploys the images of women who are living their
decayed life forgetting their great cultural heritage and the moral values. Indias past boasts
the exploits of warrior-queens, but its presence reveals cultural atrophy. Today we live in a
state of cultural topsy-turvydom caused by the crisscrossing of western and Indian values,
making the women-force feel restless. Indian history has lost its significance; it lies only in
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books. Today, instead of warrior-queens, Mahapatra notices educated urbanized women who
flaunt western values. He satirizes this cultural volte-face through the representative image of
a city woman under the sway of western culture in the poem entitled The Twentyfifth
Anniversary of a Republic: 1975.
What is wrong with my country?
The jungles have become gentle, the women restless.
And history reposes between the college girls breasts:
The exploits of warrior queens, the pride pieced together
From a gods tainted amours
Mina, my pretty neighbor, flashes round and round the gilded stage
Hiding jungles in her purse, holding on to her divorce, and a lonely Ph.D.
(Mahapatra, 1-7)
Mahapatra portrays sexual degeneration and perversion in his poems inevitably which
ultimately leads the whole generation to be weariness and boredome. As a matter of fact, sex-
act is the source of life and vitality, but if it is exercised for the sake of procreation and if it is
an expression of love. When it is exercised for the sake of momentary pleasure or momentary
benefit, it becomes the source of disappointment and disillusionment. It represents the
priority of the flesh over the spirit and thus results in decay. From the beginning of his poetic
career, Mahapatra is obsessed with the whore-image. He is chiefly concerned with the
portraits of prostitutes who do the business of flesh, not of love, sympathy or divinity. He is
deeply conscious of the facts that the whores are concerned with money who will please their
customers by sharing physical pleasures only, not by building emotional relationships with
them. They believe in physical involvement, not in emotional involvement. They will throw
all the norms and traditions of society to the wind, because they believe they believe that
theirs is a trade and profession and they must do it, and there is nothing wrong in it. Their
relations with the customers will last only for the period of their sexual-intercourse. Their
relations will be momentary, not life-long or everlasting. Lust, not love, will have the place in
their life which ultimately results frustration and malaise. Relation without love will invite
boredom and futility to them. Such is the scene portrayed in Mahapatras magnum opus poem
title The Whorehouse in Culcutta Street. The poem begins with the instruction of the
protagonist who does not know how to find a whorehouse in the streets Culcutta city and

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ends with the woman asking him to leave when she is in a hurry to receive new customer. For
example,
You fall back against her in the dumb light,
While she does what she thinks proper to please you,
The sweet, the little things, the imagined;
Until the statute of the man within
Youve believed in throughout the years
Comes back to you, a disobeying toy
her words dose behind: Hurry, will you? Let me go.
Hurry, will you? Let me go.
(Mahapatra 1976)
Here, the customer visits the whore with a keen desire for communication, as he wants to
learn something more about women but his desire is frustrated. Because she is selling
pleasure, not love and that pleasure is momentary, it will last only for a few moments. If she
sells love, then she would pass hours after hours with her companion and her partner would
have been satisfied. Here, in the poem the case is reverse. Before he attended that whore, he
had an illusion that he would have a fruitful talk with her and thus he hoped for the emotional
attachment, but his illusion is shattered against the vast force of reality. His was the
expectation to be loved by that lady, but his hope was disillusioned.
The sexual perversion, resulted from the decadent and distorted mindset of the young
generation, is prevailed to such an extent that they have become the victims of Sado-
masochism. Sado-masochism is a sexual aberration in which a demented person seeks sexual
gratification out of emotional abuse or physical violence inflicted to ones sexual partner.
Mahapatras poem entitled Lost is one of the best examples, which shows this type of sexual
perverted young lover. In this poem, the lover enjoys a vicarious pleasure from his lover with
the help of his fingertips. As the lover says,
Ive wanted to know what lulling silence
Can bloom in my hands,
What pain and pleasure your mind can wear
Through the intrigues at my fingertips.
I watch your body ease off the seasons
Stretched out on the stone of my breath,

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Going nowhere. (Mahapatra 1976)

These lines show the combination of sadism and masochism. Sadism means sexual pleasure
obtained by inflicting harm on others. Masochism means sexual pleasure obtained from
receiving harm. Here, the male partner is trying to arouse sexual desire in the female partner
with bodily movements. The proximity of the two individuals is described. Here, the lover
wants to know the impact of his touching her body with his palm and in that way he wants
her to let her body succumb to his desire. So here, the male member becomes sadist and the
female member becomes masochist. So here is sexual perverted mentality of modern young
generation which ultimately becomes the main source of futility and decadence. Here, it is
found that the male part always relates the female entity as an object through which they can
fulfill their sexual urge. Mahapatra effectively underscores the pathetic and gloomy condition
of women who have become victims of male exploitation and hunger.
A keen observer of contemporary social reality, Mahapatra does not fail to portray the
destitute poverty and hunger which is also the source of disillusionment and despair. A vision
of frustrated state of the downtrodden young mass is inevitable in some of his poems. The
most powerful realist image of a victim-woman is noticeable in his famous poem Hunger
dealing with forced-prostitution In this poem, the fisherman-father, a victim of penury,
unscrupulously allows her fifteen-year old daughter to resort to prostitution. For example,
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.
The fisherman said: will you have her, carelessly...
I heard him say; my daughter, shes just turned fifteen
Feel her. Ill be back soon; your bus leaves at nine.
(Hunger, 46)
In the lines mentioned above, the poet has expressed many things: the fathers exhausted wile
as a plea to live against poverty, the daughters youth, and the easy commerce that
disintegrates the pure veil of relationship. The speaker, who has a fair amount of flesh and
blood in him, is in search for sexual gratification, represents the hunger for sex. He cant
identify the expression on the face of the fisherman, as he is blind with his lust. He is too
hollow to understand the helplessness of the father. He does not feel ashamed of his purpose.
In the case of the father of that daughter, one can say that he also merciless who cannot offer
food to his daughter out of his hard work, but feeds himself out of the income earned by his
daughter. So being careless, he ignores to see the real fact and tries to escape from the
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situation saying: Ill be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. Attacks one critic on the
character of the father of that daughter vehemently:
A father of a daughter who has to provide her food, dress, and shelter, feeds
himself with the money earned by her! Besides, he has to inculcate the moral
values of social life. What does he do in this poem? Because of poverty, he leads
her in the wrong path. No culture of any society can approve of this. The society
stands strong by the chords of family life where there are pure ties of relationship
between father and mother, mother and son, father and daughter. Poverty and their
social status destroy the holiness of relationship between the members of a family
and a father does what he should not have done.
(Balachandran, 6)
Here, one can observe that money is termed as god by a human being for which the father
allows his daughter to lose the chastity as they are suffering from the hunger for food. So is
the case with that man who approaches the fisherman-father. He feels ashamed of his own
thinking at the end of the sexual-intercourse. When he perceived that girl, who was just
fifteen years old, he felt that her age does not make her look like a young girl. He realized
that the girl was not a living entity, but a thing made of rubber sitting in the corner of the hut
and waiting for the food as she is hungry. The boy who came for fulfilling his lust is taken
aback and feels blameworthy when the girl invited him to feel her. He says:
The sky fell on me, and a fathers exhausted wile.
Long and lean: her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide; I felt the hunger there,
The other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
(Mahapatra, 46)
He feels that his was the hunger for sex, but the place the people whom he approached were
hungry for food. This pathetic scene made him forget his carnal desire. The poverty of that
downtrodden class has changed the course of their life. It has degenerated their codes of life.
So they plunged into the business of prostitution. Moreover, here one can observe sex-ridden
young male section of the society who are blinded by the physical urge i.e. lust but their lust
is not properly fulfilled. Particularly, in this poem, the protagonist had expectation to get a
response from the other party during their intercourse. When he entered into the chamber

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where that girl was waiting for him, he felt her years were cold as rubber. So their
expectation of getting fulfilled shattered and thus leading him to be disillusioned.
Thus, Mahapatras world is filled with pain, guilt, remorse, desire and hunger of both types:
hunger for food and hunger for sex. Being aware of changing contours of contemporary life
and caught in the currents of his time, he is deeply and affectionately moved by the dirty and
dingy social panorama. He observed his surroundings and records reality. He is not a
romantic to let himself engulfed in the beauty of nature and its surroundings. He is a realist
who deals with the present sorry status of men of his landscape in particular and his nation in
general. Sense of helplessness and loss prevails in his poems. To quote the words of one critic
in this respect:
There is a remarkable poise about the way he organizes things: the dominant
concern is the vision of grief, loss, dejection, rejection. The tragic consciousness
does not seem to operate in the work of any other Indian poet in English as Indian
poet in English as disturbingly as in that of Jayanta Mahapatra.
(Panikar, 116)
References
Balachandran, K. Socio-cultural Problems in Indian Poetry in English. Recent Indian Literature in
English: A Critical Perspective. 1st ed. Ed. Mithilesh K. Pandey, 1999: 03-08. Print.
Mahapatra, Jayanta. A Missing Person. The Lie of Dawns: Poems 1947-2008. Authors Press:
Delhi, 2009: 89. Print.
---. Lost. A Rain of Rites. Uni. of Georgia Press. 1976. Print.
---. The Twentyfifth Anniversary of a Republic: 1975. Indian Poetry in English. Ed. Makarand
Paranjape. Macmillan India Ltd.: Madras, 1993:192. Print.
---. The Whore House in a Calcutta. A Rain of Rites. Uni. of Georgia Press. 1976. Print.
Misra, Chittaranjan. Image of Woman in Jayanta Mahapatras Poetry. Indian English Poetry:
Critical Perspective. 1st ed. Ed. Jaydipsinh K. Dodiya. Sarup & Sons: New Delhi, 2000: 187-
194. Print.
Nayak, Dr. Tanushree. People, Culture and Landscape in the Selected Poems of A.D. Hope and
Jayanta Mahapatra. Ed. Udayanath Majhi. Rock Pebbles 15.1 (2011): 07-16. Print.
Panikar, K. Ayappa. Peacocks among Patriarchs, Contemporary Indian English Verse. Ed.
Chirantan Kulshrestha. Arnold-Heinemann: New Delhi, 1980: 116-117. Print.
Wary, Shickna John. Themes and Techniques of Jayanta Mahapatras Poetry. Ed. Udayanath
Majhi. Rock Pebbles 15.1 (2011): 30-42. Print.

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